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Discovery Of An Extremely Young Stellar Clump In The Distant Universe
Credits: CEA/HST
As part of an observing program carried out with the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, a group of researchers from the “Service d’Astrophysique-Laboratoire AIM” of CEA-IRFU led by Anita Zanella discovered the birth cry of a massive star-forming clump in the disk of a very distant galaxy. This giant clump is less than 10 million years old, and it is the very first time that such a young star-forming region is observed in the distant Universe. This discovery sheds new light on how stars were born within distant galaxies. The physical properties of this object reveal that newly-born clumps in such galaxies survive from stellar winds and supernovae feedback, and can thus live for a few hundred million years unlike the predictions from several theoretical models. Their long lifetime could enable their migration toward the inner regions of the galaxy, hence contributing to the total mass of the galactic bulge and the growth of the central black hole. These results are published in the “Nature” journal from May 2015.
Cause Of Galactic Death: Strangulation
Artist’s impression. Credit: re-active
As murder mysteries go, it’s a big one: how do galaxies die and what kills them? A new study, published today in the journal Nature, has found that the primary cause of galactic death is strangulation, which occurs after galaxies are cut off from the raw materials needed to make new stars.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh have found that levels of metals contained in dead galaxies provide key ‘fingerprints’, making it possible to determine the cause of death.
There are two types of galaxies in the Universe: roughly half are ‘alive’ galaxies which produce stars, and the other half are ‘dead’ ones which don’t. Alive galaxies such as our own Milky Way are rich in the cold gas – mostly hydrogen – needed to produce new stars, while dead galaxies have very low supplies. What had been unknown is what’s responsible for killing the dead ones.
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Water Was Plentiful In The Early Universe
Astronomers have long held that water — two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom — was a relative latecomer to the universe. They believed that any element heavier than helium had to have been formed in the cores of stars and not by the Big Bang itself. Since the earliest stars would have taken some time to form, mature, and die, it was presumed that it took billions of years for oxygen atoms to disperse throughout the universe and attach to hydrogen to produce the first interstellar “water.”
New research poised for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Tel Aviv University and Harvard University researchers reveals that the universe’s first reservoirs of water may have formed much earlier than previously thought — less than a billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5 percent of its current age. According to the study, led by PhD student Shmuel Bialy and his advisor Prof. Amiel Sternberg of the Department of Astrophysics at TAU’s School of Physics and Astronomy, in collaboration with Prof. Avi Loeb of Harvard’s Astronomy Department, the timing of the formation of water in the universe bears important implications for the question of when life itself originated.
ALMA Discovers Proto Super Star Cluster — A Cosmic ‘Dinosaur Egg’ About To Hatch
Credit: K. Johnson, U.Va.; ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ)
Globular clusters – dazzling agglomerations of up to a million ancient stars – are among the oldest objects in the universe. Though plentiful in and around many galaxies, newborn examples are vanishingly rare and the conditions necessary to create new ones have never been detected, until now.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered what may be the first known example of a globular cluster about to be born: an incredibly massive, extremely dense, yet star-free cloud of molecular gas.
“We may be witnessing one of the most ancient and extreme modes of star formation in the universe,” said Kelsey Johnson, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and lead author on a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. “This remarkable object looks like it was plucked straight out of the very early universe. To discover something that has all the characteristics of a globular cluster, yet has not begun making stars, is like finding a dinosaur egg that’s about to hatch.”
How A New Telescope Will Measure The Expansion Of The Universe
Source: http://legacysurvey.org/viewer
For the past several years, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) have been planning the construction of and developing technologies for a very special instrument that will create the most extensive three-dimensional map of the universe to date. Called DESI for Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, this project will trace the growth history of the universe rather like the way you might track your child’s height with pencil marks climbing up a doorframe. But DESI will start from the present and work back into the past.
DESI will make a full 3D map pinpointing galaxies’ locations across the universe. The map, unprecedented in its size and scope, will allow scientists to test theories of dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to cause the accelerating expansion and stretching of the universe first discovered in observations of supernovae by groups led by Saul Perlmutter at Berkeley Lab and by Brian Schmidt, now at Australian National University, and Adam Riess, now at Johns Hopkins University.
Planck: Gravitational Waves Remain Elusive
Cosmic Microwave Background seen by Planck. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
Despite earlier reports of a possible detection, a joint analysis of data from ESA’s Planck satellite and the ground-based BICEP2 and Keck Array experiments has found no conclusive evidence of primordial gravitational waves.
The Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago and evolved from an extremely hot, dense and uniform state to the rich and complex cosmos of galaxies, stars and planets we see today.
An extraordinary source of information about the Universe’s history is the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, the legacy of light emitted only 380 000 years after the Big Bang.
ESA’s Planck satellite observed this background across the whole sky with unprecedented accuracy, and a broad variety of new findings about the early Universe has already been revealed over the past two years.
But astronomers are still digging ever deeper in the hope of exploring even further back in time: they are searching for a particular signature of cosmic ‘inflation’ – a very brief accelerated expansion that, according to current theory, the Universe experienced when it was only the tiniest fraction of a second old.
Galactic Herding: New Image Brings Galaxy Diversity To Life
Image credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA
Galaxy groups are the most evident structures in the nearby universe. They are important laboratories for studying how galaxies form and evolve beyond our own Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way and the Great Spiral in Andromeda. Exploring the nature of these extragalactic “herds” may help to unlock the secrets to the overall structure of the universe.
Unlike animal herds, which are generally the same species traveling together, most galaxies move through space in associations comprised of myriad types, shapes, and sizes. Galaxy groups differ in their richness, size, and internal structure as well as the ages of their members. Some group galaxies are composed mainly of ancient stars, while others radiate with the power and splendor of youth.
These facts raise important questions for astronomers: Do all the galaxies in a group share a common origin? Are some just chance alignments? Or do galaxy groups pick up “strays” along the way and amalgamate them into the group?
A Simulation Of The Universe With Realistic Galaxies
Credit: J. Schaye et al. 2015
The simulations took several months to run at the “Cosmology Machine” in Durham and at “Curie” in Paris, among the largest computers used for scientific research in the U.K. and France, respectively. Astronomers can now use the results to study the development of galaxies from almost 14 billion years ago until now. The results will be published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on 1 January.
or years, astronomers have studied the formation of galaxies using computer simulations, but with limited success. The galaxies that formed in previous simulations were often too massive, too small, too old and too spherical.
The galaxies formed in the EAGLE-simulation (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments) are a much closer reflection of real galaxies thanks to the strong galactic winds, which blow away the gas supply needed for the formation of stars. EAGLE’s galaxies are lighter and younger because fewer stars form and they form later. In the EAGLE simulation these galactic winds – which are powered by stars, supernova explosions and supermassive black holes – are stronger than in earlier simulations.
NASA’s Chandra Weighs Most Massive Galaxy Cluster In Distant Universe
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/P.Tozzi, et al; Optical: NAOJ/Subaru and ESO/VLT; Infrared: ESA/Herschel
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have made the first determination of the mass and other properties of a very young, distant galaxy cluster.
The Chandra study shows that the galaxy cluster, seen at the comparatively young age of about 800 million years, is the most massive known cluster with that age or younger. As the largest gravitationally- bound structures known, galaxy clusters can act as crucial gauges for how the Universe itself has evolved over time.
The galaxy cluster was originally discovered using ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory and is located about 9.6 billion light years from Earth. Astronomers used X-ray data from Chandra that, when combined with scientific models, provides an accurate weight of the cluster, which comes in at a whopping 400 trillion times the mass of the Sun. Scientists believe the cluster formed about 3.3 billion years after the Big Bang.
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An Unprecedented View Of Two Hundred Galaxies Of The Local Universe
Galaxies are the result of an evolutionary process started thousands of million years ago, and their history is coded in their distinct components. The CALIFA project is intended to decode the galaxies’ history in a sort of galactic archaeology, through the 3D observations of a sample of six hundred galaxies. With this second data release corresponding to two hundred galaxies, the project reaches its halfway point with important results behind.
The CALIFA Project allows not only to inspect the galaxies in detail, but it also provides with data on the evolution of each particular galaxy with time: how much gas and when was it converted into stars along each phase of the galaxy’s life, and how did each region of the galaxies evolve along the more than ten thousand million years of cosmic evolution.
Thanks to the CALIFA data, the astronomers have been able to deduce the history of the mass, luminosity and chemical evolution of the CALIFA sample of galaxies, and thus they have found that more massive galaxies grow faster than less massive ones, and that they form their central regions before the external ones (inside-out mass assembly).
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